The Times Reads Power Line

When Edward Said died a week ago, we commented on his despicable career and the fraudulent persona that he invented over a period of many years. We linked to a New York Times obituary that parroted, wrongly, the history of a “dispossessed Palestinian” that Said invented for himself.
Said’s lies were well documented and there is no excuse for a newspaper like the Times, which presumably has resources that exceed those available to us at Power Line, falling for his fabrications. Earlier this week the Times belatedly admitted having been suckered once again–how many times is that?–by the bald-faced lies of a leftist:
“An obituary on Friday about Edward W. Said, the Columbia University literary scholar and advocate of a Palestinian state, misidentified the city that was his childhood home and misstated the date of Jerusalem’s partition into Jewish and Arab areas. Although Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem, in 1935, his family’s home was Cairo; they did not move from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was partitioned in 1949, not 1947.”
The Times wouldn’t make this kind of elementary error if its reporters habituated the blogosphere. But it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the implications of the Times’ correction. Said’s career as an advocate of terrorism was built in large part on the fantasy that he was a Palestinian, a native of Jerusalem who was forced from his native land by Jewish usurpers. In fact, he was the son of a rich Cairo businessman who happened to be born in Jerusalem while his family was visiting relatives there. Out of this coincidence Said spun a web of lies that the New York Times gladly repeated many times, culminating in the false obituary which has now, in a single paragraph, been “corrected.” Do the people who run the Times ever wonder why it is that they keep falling for the same lies, over and over? No, I suppose not. They are neither that intelligent nor that honest.